U.N. seeks to 'neutralize' armed groups in Congo

At the beginning of 2012, more than 1.7 million people in the Democratic Republic of the Congo were internally displaced persons, according to the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. About 72,000 of those refugees were living in "spontaneous camps" where they received UNHCR assistance. /Truls Brekke photo via Global Knowledge

 

With an unprecedented vote in the United Nations Security Council on Thursday, the international organization has authorized a U.N. peacekeeping force to conduct offensive military action for the first time ever to neutralize armed groups in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

The "intervention brigade" will be deployed in eastern Congo, where armed groups have been killing and terrorizing civilians since the 1994 genocide in neighboring Rwanda. Ethnically fueled warfare that has raged in Congo since 1998 and has claimed as many as 5 million lives is widely considered one of the legacies of the Rwandan genocide.

The intervention brigade's first target will likely be fighters of the March 23 Movement. In November, M23 rebels took control of Goma in eastern Congo but they retreated under international pressure.

The new U.N. force, which will establish its headquarters in Goma, will have upto 3,000 troops. There are already about 17,700 U.N. peacekeepers and 1,400 international police officers in the central African country.

If the slaughter of millions isn't enough to draw your attention to the Democratic Republic of the Congo's fate, consider its vast natural resources:

• The DRC has some of the richest mineral deposits in the world. The country produces about half of the world's cobalt and huge quantities of tin and tungsten. IHC, a global market and economic information research firm, estimates the total value of the DRC's mineral wealth at $24 trillion.
• About two-thirds of the Congo basin rain forest is within the DRC's borders, according to Greenpeace. Only the Amazon is larger than the Congo basin rain forest, which is home to a wide range of animal and plant species including elephants, gorillas, chimpanzees and medicinal flora. Greenpeace fears a "catastrophic" impact on the global climate if uncontrolled logging in the Congo basin rain forest continues.

Hope, dread and rape in Congo

Refugees from North Kivu province, Democratic Republic of the Congo, arrive in Uganda in 2012. /UNHCR image


With a United Nations-brokered peace deal set to be signed this weekend to improve the security situation in eastern Congo, simmering violence in the southern part of the country is threatening to derail a surge of mining activity that is critically important to one of the most underdeveloped nations on Earth.

On Sunday, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and about a dozen leaders of African nations and organizations are expected to sign a peace agreement that includes creation of a U.N.-commanded military force. The so-called intervention brigade significantly deepens the peacekeeping role of the international organization because U.N. troops will have authority to use deadly force against the M23 rebels who have been clashing with government troops in eastern Congo for nearly a year.

The peace pact had been set for final approval last month, but the three countries expected to supply the most troops for the intervention brigade (South Africa, Tanzania and Mozambique) apparently balked over the issue of who would control the new military force. Diplomats said the trio opposed having the existing U.N. peacekeeping mission, MONUSCO, in charge of the intervention brigade because of its checkered record in supporting the Congolese government's effort to stave off the M23 rebels. Those differences have been papered over and the intervention brigade will be commanded through MONUSCO.

'Triangle of Death' in Katanga

While hope springs in eastern Congo, Mai Mai rebels in the southern part of the country have stepped up attacks against civilians and soldiers loyal to President Joseph Kabila.

The Katanga region has been a hotbed of Congo's mining industry since the country's colonial period under Belgian rule. Copper production in Katanga has increased steadily since a peace accord was signed in 2003, helping to fuel an increase in Congo's copper exports from 20,000 tons a decade ago to 600,000 tons last year, according to Congolese officials.

Katanga, which is about the size of Spain, has a long secessionist history, and the Mai Mai rebels appear to be trying to take advantage of growing discontent with the central government. The Mai Mai have been linked to massacres, rape and cannabalism in the northern part of Katanga, which has been dubbed the "Triangle of Death."

Medecins Sans Frontieres, one of the few aid organizations operating in the Triangle of Death, is reporting the Mai Mai are expanding their area of operation. "The Mai Mai are coming out of their normal zone within the triangle," Pascal Duchemin, an MSF official working in Katanga's provincial capital, recently told the Reuters news service. "Since December, we've seen an intensification of clashes with the army."

While officials in the country's national capital, Kinshasa, are putting a brave face on efforts to turn back the Mai Mai offensive, Katanga leaders are less optimistic. Gabriel Kyungu wa Kumwanza, president of the provincial assembly, told Reuters the spike in violence poses a threat to investment in the region's mining industry. "Yes, there's a risk," he said. "Money doesn't like noise. While there's the sound of tanks and boots, money will not come in."

Congolese gynecologist Denis Mukwege has been nominated twice for the Nobel Peace Prize. /Image via csmonitor.com

Healing Congolese rape survivors

Denis Mukwege, a gynecologist working in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and his colleagues have treated about 30,000 rape survivors over the past dozen years. The 2008 U.N. Human Rights Prize recipient and 2009 African of the Year shared his story with the BBC this week.

Here is an excerpt of the interview with this amazing healer of broken bodies and souls:

"When war broke out, 35 patients in my hospital in Lemera in Eastern DR Congo were killed in their beds.

"I fled to Bukavu, 100 kilometers (60 miles) to the north, and started a hospital made from tents. I built a maternity ward with an operating theatre. In 1998, everything was destroyed again. So, I started all over again in 1999.

"It was that year that our first rape victim was brought into the hospital. After being raped, bullets had been fired into her genitals and thighs.

"I thought that was a barbaric act of war, but the real shock came three months later. Forty-five women came to us with the same story, they were all saying: 'People came into my village and raped me, tortured me.'

"Other women came to us with burns. They said that after they had been raped, chemicals had been poured on their genitals.

"I started to ask myself what was going on. These weren't just violent acts of war, but part of a strategy. You had situations where multiple people were raped at the same time, publicly -- a whole village might be raped during the night. In doing this, they hurt not just the victims but the whole community, which they force to watch.

"The result of this strategy is that people are forced to flee their villages, abandon their fields, their resources, everything. It's very effective.

"We have a staged system of care for victims. Before I undertake a big operation, we start with a psychological examination. I need to know if they have enough resilience to withstand surgery.

"Then we move to the next stage, which might consist of an operation or just medical care. And the following stage is socio-economic care -- most of these patients arrive with nothing, no clothes even.

"We have to feed them, we have to take care of them. After we discharge them, they will be vulnerable again if they're not able to sustain their own lives. So we have to assist them on socio-economical level -- for example through helping women develop new skills and putting girls back in school.

"The fourth stage is to assist them on a legal level. Often the patients know who their assailants were and we have lawyers who help them bring their cases to court.

"In 2011, we witnessed a fall in the number of cases. We thought perhaps we were approaching the end of the terrible situation for women in the Congo. But since last year, when the war resumed, cases have increased again. It's a phenomenon which is linked entirely to the war situation.

"The conflict in DR Congo is not between groups of religious fanatics. Nor is it a conflict between states. This is a conflict caused by economic interests -- and it is being waged by destroying Congolese women."

Rape scars lives in Congo

/Image via bet.com

In late 2012, multiple journalism organizations reported a dramatic increase in rape associated with fighting in eastern Congo:
CNN
The Guardian
AFP

/Image via salon.com

Reminders of women's rights plight in 2012

After a Taliban gunman shot her in the head Oct. 9, teenage schoolgirl Malala Yousafzai is taken from the military hospital in Rawalpindi for a flight to a British hospital. /Image via indiatimes.com


The year closes with grim examples of the weak status of women's rights around the world.

On Dec. 29, an Indian medical student who had been gang raped on a New Delhi bus died in a Singapore hospital, where she had been flown for treatment of mortal injuries. Six men are accused of attacking and beating the 23-year-old and her male companion, then throwing them off the moving bus. Reuters reported: "The attack has sparked an intense national debate for the first time about the treatment of women and attitudes towards sex crimes in a country where most rapes go unreported, many offenders go unpunished, and the wheels of justice turn slowly, according to social activists."

On Oct. 9, a Taliban gunman shot Pakistani schoolgirl Malala Yousafzai point blank in the head. Soon after the attack, The New York Times reported: "She had become a symbol of resistance against the Taliban, advocating access to education for girls in an area that has been one of the Taliban’s main strongholds in Pakistan." Malala remains in the U.K. recovering from injuries to her head and neck. She "will have lifetime security" when she returns to her homeland, according to the Pakistani Interior minister.

Rape continues to be a weapon of war in the Congo, where Mother Jones reports about a half million women have been raped since the country's second civil war began in 1997. On Dec. 15, The New York York Times reported: "Many of these rapes have been marked by a level of brutality that is shocking even by the twisted standards of a place rived by civil war and haunted by warlords and drugged-up child soldiers. What’s the strategic purpose of putting an AK-47 assault rifle inside a woman and pulling the trigger? Or cutting out a woman’s fetus and making her friends eat it?"

Protecting women from this kind of abuse is a global challenge. In the United States, where sexual assault remains one of the top crimes against women and girls, there is much more that can be done at home and voices that must be raised against atrocities abroad.

Hundreds of thousands of women have been raped as part of the violence unleashed in Congo's second civil war. Rape is a weapon of war in conflicts around the world. /Image via care2.com

Congo: Africa's next genocide

At the beginning of 2012, more than 1.7 million people in the Democratic Republic of the Congo were internally displaced persons, according to the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. About 72,000 of those refugees were living in "spontaneous camps" where they received UNHCR assistance. /Truls Brekke photo via Global Knowledge

Starting in April 1994, the Tutsi ethnic group in Rwanda was targeted for genocide. In 100 days, more than 500,000 Tutsis were killed and thousands of women were raped. The total Tutsis killed in the conflict is estimated at 800,000. /Image via United Human Rights Council


In 1994, the international community turned a blind eye to a genocidal conflict in the heart of Africa. A half a million Rwandan Tutsis were killed in 100 days, a blink of an eye in the halls of power in Washington, New York and Paris, where officials took no action while a small U.N. observer mission bore witness to one of history's most barbaric episodes.

The latest civil war in the Congo has been dragging on for 14 years, grinding away in plain sight if anyone cared to watch. According to GlobalSecurity.org, 3.8 million people died in Congo from the beginning of the civil war in 1998 to an attempted political solution in 2004, the period of most intense warfare. The fighting, which has involved several neighboring countries, has flared off and on ever since.

The civil war has claimed at least 5 million lives, with no end in sight. The Germans are accused of killing 6 million Jews during World War II.

Several armies and guerrilla movements that have fought in the Congo's civil war have enlisted child soldiers. /Image via wordpress.com

The introduction to the 2012 Amnesty International human rights report on the Democratic Republic of the Congo speaks volumes:

"Impunity for crimes under international law continued in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), despite some limited progress. Government security forces and armed groups committed scores of human rights violations in eastern DRC. Nine soldiers from the Congolese armed forces, including a lieutenant colonel, were convicted of crimes against humanity, notably rape, committed on 1 January in the town of Fizi, South Kivu. They were sentenced to jail in February in a rare example of perpetrators being promptly brought to justice. However, investigations stalled into other cases of mass rapes committed by the national army and armed groups. The general elections were marred by many human rights violations, including unlawful killings and arbitrary arrests by security forces. Human rights defenders and journalists faced intimidation and restrictions on the freedoms of expression and association."